The National Women’s Soccer League kicked off its 2026 season in March with a striking scene: an announced crowd of 63,004 watching Denver Summit FC’s inaugural home game, more than 20,000 tickets beyond the league’s previous high. But while an attendance record in a rollicking NFL stadium offered a visceral sign of the NWSL’s momentum, this week provided a perhaps even more impactful demonstration.

On Tuesday, commissioner Jessica Berman announced that Columbus, Ohio, had been awarded the league’s latest expansion franchise, due to begin play in 2028 as the NWSL’s 18th team. A group led by Jimmy and Dee Haslam, the billionaire owners of MLS’s Columbus Crew and the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, is paying a $205 million fee to secure the spot, a person with knowledge of the deal tells Forbes—$40 million more than Arthur Blank, owner of MLS’s Atlanta United FC and the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, agreed to shell out for an Atlanta expansion club just five months ago.

The price is also nearly double Denver’s $110 million deal from January 2025, and almost quadruple the $53 million paid by Boston Legacy FC and the San Francisco area’s Bay FC in 2023. And it is more than 100 times the roughly $2 million expansion fees of 2021.

That sort of trajectory would have been unimaginable a few short years ago, when even the most successful teams would sell for less than $5 million, but all of the NWSL’s clubs have recently found themselves propelled skyward on a rapidly rising tide. Forbes now estimates that the league’s current teams (excluding Denver and Boston in their debut seasons) are worth $200 million on average, a 49% increase from last year. With particularly strong growth across the bottom half of the table, the median value is up even more—79%, exceeding $192 million—and the floor sits at $140 million, twice the figure from 2025.

At the top of the league, Angel City FC remains No. 1, worth $340 million, followed by the Kansas City Current at $325 million. Four other clubs—Bay FC, San Diego Wave FC, the Washington Spirit and the Portland Thorns—are worth more than $200 million as well.

For most of the teams lower in the ranking, the valuations have little to do with the current state of the franchises’ business and instead represent bets by eager investors that the league-wide upswell will someday justify the lofty price tags. For instance, Chicago Stars FC, valued at $144 million after a league-best 106% jump from 2025’s $70 million valuation, generated only $7 million in revenue during the 2025 regular season, according to Forbes estimates.

That number should take a significant step forward this year now that the team has left SeatGeek Stadium in Chicago’s southwestern........

© Forbes